Buster Brown was a famous newspaper comic strip character of the first part of the 20th century who dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy but was really a little hellion who got away with his mischief due to adults only looking at the surface of things.
This all came to an end when the Brown Shoe Company went looking for a logo for a chain of stores selling children’s shoes bought the rights to the character and he became the boy who lived in a shoe with his dog Tige, they didn’t even bring him back as a character when the Brown Shoe Company started publishing Buster Brown Comics in 1945 which were only distributed though Buster Brown Shoe Stores.
Instead the comic was made up of random adventure and fantasy stories, with a few continuing characters such as Gunga of India, Little Fox, an Indian boy, Robin Hood, and a continuing series set in an Arabian Nights fantasy land.
The “host” of the comic for the first two years was Smilin’ Ed who was also the host of the Buster Brown radio show that played on Saturday mornings, there would also be a few Smilin’ Ed stories in the comic.
Eventually when Brown got another spokesman when they changed to sponsoring a TV show they would drop Smilin’ Ed from the title and it would become just Buster Brown Comic Book.
Collected Editions
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